Laleh Khalili

Laleh Khalili is an Iranian American Professor of Gulf Studies at University of Exeter.

She was formerly a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

Life Laleh Khalili received a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Texas in 1991, a master of international affairs from Columbia University in 1999, and a PhD in political science from Columbia University in 2004.

Her primary research areas are logistics and trade, infrastructure, policing and incarceration, gender, nationalism, political and social movements, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East.

Her commentary on Middle Eastern and Iranian affairs has been used in several newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Financial Times, and Agence France-Presse. Khalili writes regularly for Iranian.com and The London Review of Books.

In 2007, Khalili signed an open letter in support of Haleh Esfandiari. She was part of the anti-racist coalition that reviewed an article by Kamel Daoud on violence against women in Cologne. The collective argued that Daoud used stereotypes and orientalist themes.

Khalili gave the Royal Geographical Society's 2024 Antipode lecture, entitled "Where is Palestine? Singapore on the Med, Spaceships, and the Mount of Olives".